While the speakers shared many valuable insights, two lessons were obvious: having a clear goal and getting the right people on board are crucial to success. These lessons are easier said than done, so let’s take a closer look:

About 10 percent of Canadian electricity, much of it generated from hydropower, is exported to the United States. With Canada expected to expand its hydropower capacity in coming years, could some states take advantage of this non-emitting resource to meet Clean Power Plan goals to reduce carbon emissions?

While U.S. hydropower is not expected to significantly expand in the near future, hydropower is growing in Canada, where it already supplies 60 percent of the country’s electricity. More than 5,500 megawatts (MW), enough to power about 2.4 million homes, have been added in the last decade. An additional 11,000 MW is either under construction, nearing the construction phase, or has been announced. To put this in perspective, Canada’s entire electricity generation system is about 128,000 MW.

States will have tremendous flexibility to choose how to reduce their carbon emissions under the Clean Power Plan, and one idea they should explore is putting a price on carbon.

The Center for Climate and Energy Solutions (C2ES) recently brought together legal and economic experts, state environmental directors, and business leaders to explore the potential to use market mechanisms to reduce these damaging emissions efficiently and cost-effectively.

As discussed at our C2ES Solutions Forum on Carbon Pricing & Clean Power, both power companies and states see advantages to using carbon pricing, such as a cap-and-trade program, to reduce carbon emissions under the Clean Power Plan.

For companies, rather than being forced into specific measures to cut emissions, a carbon price harnesses market innovation to find the most cost-effective solutions. Meanwhile, states can draw on the experiences of existing cap-and-trade programs in California and the nine-state Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI).

While the advantages of market-based approaches are widely acknowledged, some stakeholders are concerned that the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) timeline would make it challenging to develop a cap-and-trade program. EPA proposes giving states until summer 2016 to submit a plan. States could apply for a one-year extension or, if submitting a plan as part of a multistate collaboration, a two-year extension.

I have an in-law who is, shall we say, rather skeptical about climate change. Any discussion on the topic usually begins with some contrarian science theory that he heard on one of his favorite talk shows (e.g. sun spots, deep ocean magma, urban heat islands), and then devolves from there.

Why do some Americans believe the antithesis of the scientific consensus on issues like climate change?

This topic is explored by Professor Andy Hoffman of the University of Michigan in his new book, How Culture Shapes the Climate Change Debate. As suggested by the title, Hoffman’s thesis – a distillation of considerable research from social scientists over the past several years – is that the public’s understanding of climate change, like other historically contentious issues such as evolution, acid rain, the ozone hole, and genetically modified food – is as much a cultural issue as a scientific one.

One of the key arguments is that a scientific consensus does not necessarily reflect a “social consensus,” the latter being something that the majority of society would consider to be true. For instance, the scientific consensus that cigarettes harm human health emerged decades before the social consensus emerged.